When we first come into contact with a group of people who are actively relating to each other, we have discovered a society. Our earliest observations of these people may alert us to various material possessions and tools that they utilize. Perhaps they dress strangely, to our taste, and eat strange foods. Perhaps their media of communication are quite different from our own. As we live closely with them, we may discover religious beliefs and practices and educational programs.
It is conceivable that this entire array of behaviors is accidental. We could even imagine a situation in which every generation has to invent its way of life on its own and from scratch. Perhaps it is all instinctual or biologically determined. But when we talk of "custom" we are saying that these behaviors have a significant history for this society. They have been with the society over a long time depth, being modified in only small ways from one generation to another. They have been passed from one generation to another. Ruth Benedict says, "We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition." (Patterns of Culture, p. 15) Society is structured by and maintained by culture.
It is culture that is responsible for passing customs onward and that maintains society in a more-or-less constant form of appearance and behavior. Separate elements of what we should call culture are responsible for passing information on to the youth; other elements are responsible for enforcement so that people do not diverge from the patterns of behavior; and still other elements are responsible for keeping social behavior and material economy timely and appropriate to conditions. To study culture is to discover the composition of all these elements and to understand how they work together.
A central element of culture is a collection of human values. To the degree that these values are instrumental in keeping aspects of the culture functioning together with some stability, it is essential to have these values passed on to the young. Does the culture value individualism or collectivism? Does it value individual property and wealth or shared resources? Are material values more important than spiritual ones? Does it value a sense of status in a class-conscious system, or do people nurture egalitarianism? Does it value the acquisition of status or a tradition of inherited positions? Are any particular objects valued as sacred?
While parents may use both examples of behavior and discipline to emphasize values, a society's system of education and religious institutions usually are also significantly involved in passing these to the young. Fundamental values are also picked up by media of communication and by the arts and by literature. The aspiring anthropologist can't go wrong keeping an eye on literature and the arts!
Oddly enough, while we are very much aware of the societies in which we live, we are frequently not at all aware of their cultural dependence. Successful cultures function with subtlety and behind the scenes. So we carry the elements of our cultures off wherever we go, without knowing it, and here the problems begin. As Benedict suggests in her first chapter, our blindness to our own culture leads us to fail to see the culturally conditioned bases of other people's societies; hence, we criticize them for their behaviors which seem irrational to us. "There has never been a time when civilization stood more in need of individuals who are genuinely culture-conscious, who can see objectively the socially conditioned behavior of other people without fear and recrimination." (pp. 10-11) "A knowledge of cultural forms is necessary in social thinking," she continues, "and the present volume is concerned with this problem of culture." (p. 16)
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